Anyone have XP w/ Rapids PWM Controller?

Owned one for a while. It was okay... It really does not have a lot of room for expansion, and the overall abilities are pretty slim. I also did not like having no LED read out to show you what was going on. You pretty much were guessing based on the visual intensity of the LED's as to what voltage out you were giving.

It pretty much only lets you ramp up and down in preset time limits, over a preset lighting timer (8,10,12 hour). You get some independent control via the ability to put different drivers on different outputs, but you cannot set the blues at say 70% and whites at 30%. It all has to be done on the SV2 and you just ramp to overall intensity from 1-10v.

It was nice however that it didn't do a lot in some regards because that is just more crap to figure out and need to mess around with..

 

Not really...

You set your SVR2 to the right Amps and use the controller for your "%". Since the controller and driver understand 0-10v you can convert that to % 1v = 10%. I use a voltmeter to see where my PWM is at.

 

You can control the different channels separately, however there is no ramping up or down. Just 3 present mode (just different lengths of how long each channel is on). I don't really care much for mine as I have never been able to get anything to work right, and have never seen any difference when trying to dim a channel. Although you are suppose to be able to dim each channel in 10% increments (also no display to tell where they should be). I think I'm going to look into the Typhoon myself if it ever comes back in stock.

 

Well this has been informative faster than I expected. I'll just wait for the Typhoon to come back around.
Having met Mike in person and dealing with him quite a bit, I'm being honest when I say I hate to take my business elsewhere for a controller.

 

I love my typhoon, easy to run and operate! May consider adding the program i sent ya in a PM to keep the blues running for a longer moonlight, but i just have my fade out time real long and its fine for me!

The wires are a bit touchy as in, if ya fiddle with it too much, the tend to turn off! But ya put it in a control box and your fine! I love how easy it is to just change stuff! Although the other day the breaker box tripped, and reset 1 channel to -23,857%! That took awhile to ramp it back up!

I really liked Mike's service too! But John at boostled is awesome too! During the reefwerk fiasco, he called twice to help me try to get those POS lights they sent to work, until i decided to just send them back!

 

Mike, wait for the Typhon, much more utility and you have everything in obvious number values on a display.

If you don't mind a little programming you can really make it dance I think from my experience with the Arduino language.

 

I suppose you misunderstood what I meant. You cannot blend the colors on that PWM controller regardless of converting volts to percents. If you want a final color mix of, as stated in my example 70-30%, you have to adjust the amps on the SV2 pot in order to do that. You have no independent control over these channels on the controller itself. The controller only allows you to do 10% incremental adjustments over all channels at the same time.

Your percents have to be predetermined by the amperage you chose when setting the pots... For example 1500mA x .30(30%) = 450mA

This would state that if your PWM was outputting 10v then your whites would be at 30% of their max output. At that same 10v your blues would be putting out 70% of their max output assuming you had the SV2 set correctly. When you dim the controller down in intensity they both drop simultaneously to 20-60, 10-50 etc.

 

You can adjust each channel separately, to do so, use the mode button to cycle to the channel you want to adjust (starts at all 3, then 1st, 2nd, finally 3rd) set the desired intensity. By doing this you can adjust each channel separately.

This is all in the info on there site under the controller specs if you need it again.

After all that is the reason for having dimmable drivers and a controller.

 

Yeah that manual reads pretty vaguely and without actually having the controller in my hand to coordinate instruction with use made the functions hard to comprehend.

No matter. I'll be pre-ordering a Typhoon and John will ship it when it's available again.

 

It reads pretty vague even with the controller in my hands lol. Good call on the Typhoon, I think I'm gonna go that route as well, maybe even a rebuild.